Reviews

What a lovely space the Sheen Center For Thought & Culture’s Loreto Theater on Bleecker Street is: stately, warm, and welcoming. Appositely, the exquisitely performed All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 is reaching out intimately and powerfully to audiences there.

Not all the seats were occupied at the performance this critic attended, and every seat should be. And, Broadway producers note: this 75-minute show would flourish on a bigger stage too.

The story is well-known: in the first year of World War One, hostilities along extensive sections of the Western Front late on Christmas Eve and into Christmas Day, 1914, ceased. English and German soldiers emerged from their respective trenches to cross ‘No man’s land’ and meet one another. For these few precious hours, the sound of gunfire ceased. Songs were sung, gifts exchanged, and—although this has been disputed—games of football played.

A legendary incident of World War I occurred on Christmas Eve in 1914, when gunfire suddenly went quiet along stretches of the Western Front as British and German troops spontaneously observed an informal holiday truce during which time they climbed out of their trenches and met each other halfway across No Man’s Land.

All Is Calm, which opened tonight at the Sheen Center, is a touching musical tribute to that brief time when peace on Earth reigned over desolate battlefields. Created by Peter Rothstein, who stages this production by Theater Latté Da, the 75-minute show incorporates spoken excerpts from period letters, autobiographies, poetry, and military documents with more than 30 songs from those terrible times.

Told mostly from the British point of view, the documentary-style musical begins in an upbeat flurry of patriotic ditties and optimistic sentiments in August, 1914, as young men enlist and sail across the English Channel, confidently expecting to return home victoriously by Christmas.

“All Is Calm” was first performed in a church auditorium in 2007. The nine singers of Cantus and three actors under the direction of Peter Rothstein presented this slender, poignant story of the Christmas Truce of World War I as a piece for radio listening — a concert with spoken word.

Hennepin Theatre Trust was eager to have Rothstein bring his show to the Pantages Theatre in downtown Minneapolis the following year and with the smallest bit of tinkering — a dark firmament, some twinkling stars and falling snow — the actors began to stretch their legs as they orated and the men of Cantus ably filled up the larger psychic space.

If you're looking for a truly unique and engaging Christmas/holiday recording, you shouldn't miss this new release from the 9-member professional male vocal ensemble Cantus. Billed as a "radio musical drama", All is Calm presents songs, poetry, letters, and journal excerpts relating to the extraordinary World War I incident known as "the Christmas Truce", in which on Christmas Eve, 1914, soldiers from the trenches on both sides of the front lines in Belgium spontaneously initiated a cease-fire like no other, a celebration not only of Christmas — carols were sung back and forth, trees were lit with candles, food and drink was passed around, pictures were taken, a game of soccer was played — but also of the basic humanity all of these men shared, as they helped each other bury the dead that for days had lain unattended across no man's land.

An invention of Theatre Latté Da mastermind Peter Rothstein, All is Calm tells the true story of one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of warfare, a night during the first year of World War I when German and British soldiers laid down their weapons and sang drinking songs and Christmas carols to each other until dawn, then played a spirited game of soccer and buried each other's dead before getting back to the business of killing.

The joy of "Peace on Earth" rarely has seemed so real as it does in this sweet story of a Christmas Day when enemies embraced each other.

The premiere of AllIsCalm last Christmas season took place on a small stage in a church auditorium crammed with folding chairs. The intimacy heightened a poignant tale of enemies celebrating a one-day truce at Christmas, 1914, on fields rimed with blood and snow. So successful was the show that Theatre Latté Da and the vocal group Cantus moved into the Pantages Theatre in Minneapolis this year.

All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 is an unstaged but still dramatic telling of an extraordinary event in human history, when during the first year of World War I, thousands of young men lay down their arms and celebrated Christmas together in no man’s land.

Tossed off with a chirpy smile and handshake, the clichés of Christmas greetings offer but a slight anodyne to winter's dreary fog. How lovely, then, to reclaim the meaning of the phrase All is Calm. A new work for spoken word and choral voices uses that title to commemorate an extraordinary moment when Christian peace trumped war in 1914.